


The Menagerie Room

by rubyofkukundu



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell & Related Fandoms, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Gen, Ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:08:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26584147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rubyofkukundu/pseuds/rubyofkukundu
Summary: Excerpt from brochure "Welcome to Starecross Hall and Gardens", published 2015.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 20





	The Menagerie Room

Excerpt from brochure "Welcome to Starecross Hall and Gardens", published 2015.

_...The room on the South-West corner of the house is known as the Menagerie Room due to the animal carvings that decorate the wooden panelling. Found amongst the carvings are horses, birds, dogs and, for some inexplicable reason, a monkey riding a cow. Originally the room would have been a drawing room and the ornate coat of arms on the chimney breast attests to the room's original status. Subsequent occupants of the house have used the room as a bedchamber and a study, although for several decades prior to 2001 the room was used only as a store for furniture. The panelling on the Western wall contains no animal carvings and is of more recent date than the rest, perhaps 18th Century. During building work in the 1960s this later panelling was discovered to hide a blocked doorway into the adjoining closet.[1] Looking to the windows on the Eastern wall, we see that these are older than the windows in much of the house, with the year 1549 scratched into the lintel on the right-hand side. The view from the window is of the orchard and the hill behind it and receives good sunlight in the summer months..._

[1] When Mr Segundus returned from dinner, having not stayed to take tea, he found his office growing dark. He lit a candle so that he might see the letters he was writing and sat down at his desk for what he hoped would be several productive hours of work. There was a chill in the air that evening which had not been present earlier in the day and Mr Segundus fancied that he would most likely be required to don his gloves before too many weeks were out. Still, he was used to being a little cold (not ever having had much money for firewood) and so did not let it bother him overmuch.

Some half an hour or so later, Mr Segundus found himself growing colder still, though the fire in the grate sounded as if it were crackling merrily enough. "Perhaps," thought Mr Segundus fretfully, "I have chosen the wrong room for my office." (For Mr Segundus had not yet been at Starecross for a full winter and knew not the temperament of the place.)

Wondering if he ought to risk another log on the fire, he turned in his chair to look at the fireplace and discovered that he was not alone.

There, standing in front of the fire, was a woman: short in stature, with strange clothes upon her person (why, they looked all old-fashioned, fine though they were) and with a pensive look upon her face.

"Oh!" said Mr Segundus, rather alarmed to find himself with a visitor. "Please excuse me, Madam! I did not..."

She turned to him then, but... Oh, it was a very queer thing, but it was almost as if she did not look _at_ Mr Segundus at all but instead looked _through_ him. After but a moment she strode toward Mr Segundus, so suddenly and so determinedly that Mr Segundus cried out and jumped up from his chair for he was certain she would collide with him.

Collide she did not, and nor did she collide with Mr Segundus' chair or his desk either. Instead she strode straight through both chair and desk as if they were nothing and then passed on into the wall behind, thus disappearing from view.

For several moments Mr Segundus could do nothing more than gape at the place in the wainscotting where she had last been seen. Then, tentatively, he stepped over to the wall and knocked upon it. His knuckles made a rapping sound against the wood (as one would expect), though it rang a little hollow as if the wall behind the wainscotting were not very thick.

"Halloo!" said Mr Segundus to the wall. "Madam?"

When such calls brought forth neither woman nor answer, Mr Segundus decided to examine the wall from the other side and so he took up his candle and made his way to the adjoining room (though Mr Segundus used the door and the hallway for his journey rather than making an attempt upon the wainscotting).

The room next door was a little closet that had not yet been cleared and was filled with a jumble of furniture. It had never been a room worthy of note and would not have been that evening either, save that a strange woman now stood in the centre of it (which was particularly surprising given that there was no room in the closet at all, but she did not seem to notice that she was standing in the middle of a chair).

She was at that moment bending down, pulling something from a pocket as she did so, which something glinted in the light of Mr Segundus' candle. Then she bent down further and disappeared beneath the seat of the chair, only to reemerge moments later, though the object in her hand now appeared to be gone.

Her chest rose and fell once, twice, then she turned and strode back through the wall.

"Oh!" cried Mr Segundus. "Madam, the wall again!"

He rushed back to his office just to see her pass through his desk and walk over to the fireplace. There she... Well, it is perhaps too much to say that she disappeared, but maybe it is more appropriate to say that while she certainly seemed to be there in one moment, by the next there was nothing but a dark shape or two which, on closer inspection, appeared merely to be flickering shadows cast by the dancing of the fire.

For several minutes Mr Segundus stood in the doorway of his now-empty office, staring at the room quite stupidly. He turned and went back to the closet and stared at that stupidly too, but the woman wasn't there either. With no explanation forthcoming as to what he had just seen, Mr Segundus returned to his desk, but he found that his enthusiasm for his correspondence had quite left him.

Well, that may have been an end to the tale. But two weeks later, when Mr Segundus was at his desk puzzling out the household accounts (something he had not had much practice at, being a bachelor all his life and used to living in lodging houses), he found himself growing chill. And when he stopped and thought about it, he realised that it was a chill he recognised.

Turning, he found a woman standing at the fireplace.

"Madam," said Mr Segundus, unsure what to say, but driving on regardless. "May I introduce myself? I am..."

But Mr Segundus could not say who he was, for the woman had walked straight into him (what a surprising, tingling sensation!) and then through his desk and through the wall and Mr Segundus grabbed up his candle and ran to the closet next door just in time to see her kneel down while pulling the glinting thing from her pocket.

"Madam," said Mr Segundus again, but she did not heed him. Instead she stood and made the return journey through the wall and not any flustered attempt at conversation from Mr Segundus would stop her.

This happened again two nights later, and the week after that. And while Mr Segundus did not necessarily mind sharing a room with this strange woman who appeared not to notice his presence, he did find himself a little disturbed to have his desk walked into so often while he was sitting at it and trying to concentrate.

In the meantime Mr Segundus had not been idle. He had looked through the records in the library to see if he might find some clue as to who this woman was and what she was doing in his office. But the papers were many, and unsorted, and all Mr Segundus had found in those few weeks were bills and estate accounts and a little notebook about gardening.

Not to be put off, Mr Segundus then took a different tack. Every time she visited, the woman went into the closet and knelt upon the floor (though what she did there, Mr Segundus was still unsure). And so, if the records would not help him, Mr Segundus determined to help himself; which is to say that he cleared the closet of all its furniture until it was quite bare and the hall beside it quite full.

Thus cleared, the closet did not look very exciting: it was but a small room with walls empty and floor wooden and not a dab of paint upon any of it. Mr Segundus set upon his search regardless. He looked at every part of the room: every stone and every board and every corner, knocking on walls with his knuckles and stamping on the floor with his feet.

This last resulted in some success, for one part of the floor resounded louder than the rest, as if it were hollow underneath. Eagerly Mr Segundus clambered down onto his hands and knees and scrabbled around on the floor until he had discovered that one of the floorboards could be lifted up. And so lift it he did.

There, underneath the floorboard and sitting in a bed of straw, was something that Mr Segundus knew well.

It was a rosary.

"Oh," gasped Mr Segundus. He reached into the little cavity and gently brought the rosary out. "You were hiding it," he said softly.

It was a very pretty thing: well-made and glinting in the light of the candle, and far nicer than the rosary Mr Segundus had inherited from his grandmother.

Looking down at this precious thing in his palm, Mr Segundus wondered what he ought to do. Perhaps, he thought, he ought to inspect it in the light from the fire in his office before he came to any further decision, but when he turned and made to stand he discovered that he was no longer alone.

The woman stood looking at him (not looking _through_ him this time but quite intently _at_ him).

"Madam," said Mr Segundus a trifle shakily, feeling rather surprised and rather guilty. "Is this yours?" He held the rosary out.

Her eyes followed the movement of his hand and its prize, but she did not move to take it. Instead she turned and vanished through the wall.

"Ah! Wait!" called Mr Segundus. "Madam!" he rushed around to his office, only for the woman to emerge from his office door and pass straight through him. "Oh!" cried he.

She did not stop. Quickly down the hall she walked and through a door into the kitchens. Alarmed and not a little confused, Mr Segundus did his best to follow after.

Through the kitchens she went and he followed (though he could not at all keep up), then out by the scullery and through a door to the gardens.

Night had fallen several hours before and outside the house it was cold and dark. Oh, and Mr Segundus had only a little, flickering candle to light his way, not a sturdy lantern, and the woman was so far ahead now she was faint: just a whisper of colour up ahead of him.

Yet the woman did not slow down nor wait for him. She passed through the walled garden, with Mr Segundus scrambling after, through the orchard and up the hill beyond. There, finally, now far away at the top of the hill, she stopped, no more than the faintest hint of a figure in the moonlight. This figure turned to Mr Segundus and then was no longer there, just as she had disappeared beside the fireplace in his office.

The rosary was now rather warm and clammy from where Mr Segundus was clutching it in his fist. He dashed up to the top of the hill, the cold night air burning in his throat, but the woman was nowhere to be seen.

"Here?" he asked the empty darkness, his breath coming in heavy gasps. "Am I meant to be here? Did you want me to bring it here?"

There was no answer.

Yet Mr Segundus had a feeling that "here" was indeed where he ought to be and where the rosary ought to remain. All about him, however, was bare grass; there was not anywhere to set the rosary down.

"If I merely place it on the grass," thought Mr Segundus, "anyone might take it up, and that will not do at all." He thought about it some more. "Ought I to bury it?"

Digging a hole in the cold ground with neither spade nor shovel is no easy task, yet Mr Segundus tugged at the damp grass and clawed at the cold earth with his fingers until he had made a little depression (though it was, admittedly, rather shallow). Into this depression he gently set the rosary down.

He looked at it there, shining in the moonlight (for his candle had long since blown out), feeling a little overwhelmed. But with nothing more to be done, he said a few words over it and filled the hole back up.

What Mr Segundus had thought would happen when the rosary was fully buried he did not know, but what did happen was this: nothing. There was no sound, no sight, no movement of air: nothing at all to suggest whether Mr Segundus might have done the right thing.

"I have left your rosary here, Madam," said Mr Segundus to the darkness around him. "I hope that is what you wished for."

He received no reply.

On returning to the Hall Mr Segundus had much to sort out, for his nails were torn and his hands covered with dirt and the hallway by his office full of furniture. Once all was cleaned and trimmed and tidied, Mr Segundus waited for several hours for something more to happen, but nothing did.

Ah well. Days passed but still nothing happened and Mr Segundus resigned himself to that being the end of the mystery. He did not know if he had done correctly by the mysterious woman, but he had at least not been disturbed by her walking through his desk again, which was perhaps something.

Thus things returned to something a little like normal (as normal as the life of any magician can be). And yet a month later (and on other occasions after that) when one afternoon Mr Segundus happened to look out of the window in his office, on the hill behind the orchard he glimpsed, in the golden sunlight, something that looked a little like a figure.

It may just have been a trick of the light upon the windowpanes (for certainly the windows were very old) but for a second it almost looked as if there was indeed a figure there and that said figure had raised a hand. But then the sight was gone: nothing more than a trick of light upon glass.


End file.
